The Effect of Network Position on the Efficiency of Open Collaboration: A Study of Wikipedia Featured Article Edits

Abstract

The success of Wikipedia is due to the large number of volunteers collaborating to provide content to Wikipedia articles. In this paper, we study the effect of network position on the promotion of an article to a featured article. We focus on the edits of featured Wikipedia articles to study the effects of the centrality of editors and centrality of articles on the promotion of featured articles. Considering the editing precedence among editors within an article, editor collaboration networks for a single article are generated using the total English-written featured articles on Wikipedia. In addition, based on the affiliation network of editors and articles, an article-to-article network and an editor-to-editor collaboration network are constructed. Based on the investigation of the networks, we find that article centrality in an article-to-article network has a negative effect on the promotion of an article, and editor centrality in an article-to-article networks has a positive effect on promotion. In addition, editor centrality in an editor-to-editor network has a negative effect on promotion. Some theoretical and managerial implications are provided in view of these results.